In his first recorded sermon, Jesus introduced a revolutionary concept that neither Israelites nor Romans had contemplated in the ages of the Old Testament, what he termed the “kingdom of God.” The original texts’ word, basileia, offers us several conceptual translations into English, like the “government” of God, or the “society” of God, or the “dominion” of God. Certainly Israelites and Romans had said things about heavenly kingdoms, but nothing like Jesus’s reformulation of what God, as opposed to people’s ideas about God, was creating in the world: not a kingdom in the monarchical sense, not a government in the human intersocial sense, not a reign or an empire or a militaristic takeover, but rather a complete transformation of human society into a heavenly domain.
This theme continues frequently throughout Jesus’s entire ministry, and in the first recorded parables, we read of Jesus presenting several analogies for the kingdom of God that push us further into his remarkable concept of such a kingdom. In the pericope sequence, we get the first block of parables, all focused on the kingdom of God:
- Parable of the Secret Seed (Pericope no. 107)
- Parable of the Wheat and Tares (no. 108)
- Parable of the Mustard Seed (no. 109)
- Parable of the Leaven (no. 110)
- Parable of the Hidden Treasure (no. 113)
- Parable of the Net (no. 114)
- Parable of the Householder’s Treasure (no. 115)
All of these parables invoke the “basileia of God” as the subject of the analogy with openings like “So is the basileia of God” and “The basileia of God is likened unto…” Thematically, we must remember that the takeaway from this set of parables is Jesus trying to teach us about the kingdom of God by plain analogies that a mixed, everyday provincial audience can understand.
Parables’ Premises
Parable of the Secret Seed
The kingdom of God is likened to a man casting seed into the ground and not knowing how plants spring up and grow from seeds. But when fruit emerges, the man goes to work with the sickle to harvest what has grown.
Parable of the Wheat and Tares
The kingdom of heaven is likened to a man who sowed good seed but while asleep, his enemy came and sowed weeds, and when the plants began to bear fruit, the weeds could be seen intermingled with the crop. Farmhands approached the householder and asked why weeds had damaged the harvest and whether they should pull the weeds. The householder directed them to let the crop grow to a full harvest and then they would reap the whole field and separate good fruit from weeds. They would keep the fruit and burn the rest.
Parable of the Mustard Seed
The kingdom of God is likened to a grain of mustard seed that when planted is among the smallest of seeds but grows larger than all other herbs and can give shelter to birds with great branches.
Parable of the Leaven
The kingdom of God is likened to leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of dough until the whole batch was leavened.
Parable of the Hidden Treasure
The kingdom of heaven is likened to a treasure hidden in a field that went unnoticed until a man found it and then sold all he had to buy the field.
Parable of the Net
The kingdom of heaven is likened to a net that when cast into the sea gathered fish of all kinds. When the fishers drew their catch to shore, they gathered the good fish into vessels and cast away the bad.
Parable of the Householder’s Treasure
Every scribe who is instructed in the kingdom of heaven is like a man that is a householder who brings out of his treasures new and old things.
Context
Here are some important contextual items worth remembering that can enhance our understanding of Jesus’s analogies for the kingdom of God.
Galilean Agriculture. For many of these parables, agriculture functions as the principal context—sowers, householders, farmhands, seeds, plants, fruits, harvests; these all play off the provincial setting for this new audience in the Galilean countryside and lakeside port towns. Provincial elites (the 90th percentile) controlled around two thirds of all wealth at the time. This had major industrial effects on farming, since farmstead owners—or householders—managed upwards of 80 percent of Galilean crops. Josephus, an important Jewish historian who wrote not long after Jesus’s crucifixion, described granaries in Galilee worth the most and containing the largest store of the whole Roman province of Judaea. He said crops consisted mostly of wheat, maize, and barley and that Herodian elites owned estates up and down the western coastline of Lake Gennesaret between Gennesaret Village, Magdala, and Tiberias—especially near a patch of hot springs by the lake near Magdala in the year 19 AD. Strabo, a Roman chronicler, mentioned that Lake Gennesaret produced huge hauls of (in today’s names) sardines, tilapia, and eels, and that the surrounding farms produced the largest yields of fruits (mostly olives) and grain in all of the eastern Mediterranean. Strabo also described the Galilean industry as fully farmsteaded and commercialized, competing with Ephesus as a prime destination for Roman elites. Emperor Claudius in the 40s AD took his family to Tiberias on the lake as a vacation destination and apparently erected a whole villa there.
Peasant Farmers and Farmsteads. All this meant that peasant farmers, who made up Jesus’s primary audience for these parables, lived under a tightly controlled, laborious, back-breaking system. They watched nearly the entire surplus of their harvests go to farmstead owners, market, and taxation. Their own private yield often didn’t feed their families, and so they undertook day labor and even begging to repay debts. Most rented their farmland from farmstead owners, and if they purchased any land, it often was a subdivision of the larger acreage they worked. Families often tried to pass down plots of purchased land to their children with the hope of one day building enough owned acreage to sustain an extended family.
Galilean Naturalism. No botany science existed at the time. Peasant farmers truly did not pretend to know how seeds sprouted. They couldn’t tell you about the actual chemical processes going on in the dirt and with sunlight and with watering. Even among Israelites professing belief in a One True God, peasant farmers very often associated divine personalities with natural events, weather, and climate, and would perform various routines and rituals hoping to appease gods and secure favor. If a blight wiped out a crop, they usually attributed the calamity to angering a divine power somehow, or to their own vices, or blaming one another for a lack of obedience to God. They often considered a good harvest the bounty of divine blessings and looked at their recent past for indicators of how they had merited such favor. We can see these kinds of interpretations about famines and harvests in the Old Testament: “prospering in the land” was purely an agricultural notion, meaning the harvest had given more than typical and the people must have done something righteous to have made this possible.
Seeds. In Galilean farming, “bad seed” consisted of a blend of wheat or barley with various weeds. One couldn’t always tell just how much of a batch of seed contained weeds, and so peasant farmers often kept seeds extracted from their harvests set aside in granary pots and used those exclusively when sowing. If weeds sprouted in a field, workers sometimes assumed such came from negligence on the part of whomever stored the family’s seeds. Farmers would usually extract what little fruit they could from a crop saturated with weeds and burn the rest as quickly as possible to recover the ground for another planting season. Letting the whole field mature and then separate fruit from weeds would guarantee a weak yield and jeopardize the market value of the crop and the wealth of the farmstead owner.
Mustard. Peasant farmers considered mustard an herb that had only medicinal, not nutritional, value. Because of this, they often treated mustard plants as weeds. According to Pliny, a Roman lawyer and naturalist about 20 years younger than Jesus, mustard was a “tare” that spread faster than all other herbs, and while not at all popular among peasant farmers, could still be put to good use. In Jewish Mishnaic texts, mustard is described as a plant not worth burning like other tares, but still undesirable compared to all other herbs.
Sarah’s Measures of Meal. Synagogue elders and temple priests often referenced an episode recorded in Genesis 18 when God visited Abraham in the form of three figures, and Abram rushed to his wife Sarah to ask her to prepare bread. Sarah made three measures of bread meal and mixed in leaven into all three to ensure she didn’t have a bad batch and that she had enough for the three messengers. The story held prominence in early Israelite history for representing the threshold at Abraham’s tent where God stood, and so the Tabernacle of Moses had as the final element before the veil of the Holy of Holies a “table of shewbread” with those three measures of meal. The Second Temple in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus also contained a table of shewbread that even non-Jewish Judaeans had heard about.
Tenant Farming. A contemporaneous text, sometimes called the “Fifth Gospel” for its proximity in composition to the other four gospels, adds detail to the parable of the hidden treasure. In the Gospel of Thomas, it has Jesus saying that an owner of a field died without knowing that treasure had been buried there. A tenant farmer who rented the land discovered the treasure, and obscured the quality of the field so he could buy the land outright at a lower price, and then sold off all his possessions to acquire the field. This telling invoked a somewhat regular occurence, when peasant farming families purchased plots of land, especially where the elite landowner lived far away and hardly (sometimes never) visited the actual field. They would let the field grow weeds and look infertile to lower its appraisal so they could buy it on the cheap.
Size as Quality of Fish. Also in the Gospel of Thomas and in another source, a letter from Clement who was a contemporary of the original Twelve, the parable of the net is described as fishermen collecting a catch and separating the fish by size, not by “good” and “bad,” which aligns with what we know of fishing then as now: smaller fish get tossed back into the water.
Householders, the Farmstead Owners. Farmstead owners, called “householders” in the King James, often exhibited their valuables to visitors. They liked to show off their old items that had value for their age as well as new inventions that had value for being innovative and hard to get. We have accounts of Roman elites collecting ancient and cutting-edge artworks, writings, and tools.
Takeaways
With all this context in mind, here are some takeaways from the parables as Jesus’s immediate audience likely understood them:
God and Jesus have launched the kingdom of God in the world, which started almost imperceptibly and spontaneously and grew quickly. This kingdom eludes human awareness but appears within us and will inevitably reach a culminating harvest. If people could discern the kingdom, they would see its value and willingly join it and devote themselves to it, including even setting aside their comforts and typical understandings of success, wealth, accomplishment, and status. The kingdom takes on characteristics like a field with both good fruit and undesirable weeds—those grow together and are seen alongside each other, and only when the whole field becomes fully ripened, will God and Jesus separate and gather the world. Nurturing humanity within this growing kingdom of God costs God and Jesus a great deal. Their personal comforts and outcomes are less, but they care about the whole field and not maximizing their own profit. The kingdom won’t look attractive, but will always offer utility and be salutary for everyone. It grows quickly and is sturdy. God will come for a leavened, risen, ready meal, and those in the kingdom of God will have nurtured the whole world in preparation of that day. The despised and the poor see the inestimable treasure of the kingdom of God and are the first to give up the pursuit of riches and status and the acclaim of the world to participate in that kingdom. Everyone will one day be caught in the net of the kingdom of God, we will see everyone within the kingdom, but the healthiest of us will be those already nurtured and filled by God and Jesus. The poor of society whose labor is extracted to enrich others can have hope that the oppressive system will inexorably give way to God’s kingdom, which offers them a bounteous harvest forever. Those who speak of the kingdom of God will find treasures old and new.
Sources
- Ofer Sion, Uzi ‘Ad, Mordechai Haiman, and Giora Parnos, “Excavations and Surveys at Ḥorbat Anusha and Ḥorbat Leved in the Samarian Shephelah,” ‘Atiqot: Publication of the Israel Antiquities Authority 55 (2007): 109–159.
- Sean Freyne, Jesus, A Jewish Galilean: A New Reading of the Jesus-Story (London: T&T Clark, 2004).
- Mordechai Aviam, Jews, Pagans and Christians in the Galilee (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004).
- Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
- Wolfgang Stegemann, Bruce J. Malina, and Gerd Thiessen, eds., The Social Setting of Jesus and the Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002).
- Ephraim Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible (New York: Doubleday, 2001).
- Gerbern G. Oegma, The Anointed and His People: Messianic Expectation from the Maccabees to Bar Cochba (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998).